1. Technical Field
The present invention generally relates to a local area network and, more specifically to streamlining the addressing efficiency over the network. More particularly still, the present invention relates to an improved address resolution protocol, which allows address resolution protocol traffic to be sent to only those nodes addressed without having to broadcast the message through all nodes possible on the network.
2. Description of the Related Art
A conventional local area network is designed to allow several individual computers to communicate one to another over the network. Typically, these networks include a server computer, which is used to broadcast messages and control flow over the network for all connected computers or nodes.
To communicate over the network system, an address resolution protocol (ARP) is used. ARP allows the nodes to find one another via the internet protocol (IP) addressing in the network environment in a conventional fashion to those skilled in the art. ARP protocol maps IP addresses to physical device addresses. For example, a first node on the LAN finds a second node using the same LAN by sending an ARP request packet onto the LAN.
The ARP request packet is then sent out on the LAN to all devices located on the LAN via a broadcast frame. Every device looks at and processes the ARP request packet and only the actually targeted address responds to the packet. Additionally, each ARP mapping is also aged as it remains in use and, as it becomes old, the process is repeated to refresh the address mapping. This reresolution generates a significant amount of LAN traffic and every node on the network sees each generated frame because the requests are broadcast. In turn, every node must waste valuable processing time determining whether this frame is for the node or not.
Accordingly, what is needed is an improved reresolution protocol that greatly reduces LAN traffic by generally avoiding broadcast requests in favor of specific adapter targeted requests.